Calm Golf App

If you are someone who gets angry, stressed or nervous playing golf, then you should try the Calm Golf app. Being aware of your mental state helps keep yourself rational in difficult situations. Too often, we react to situations and then think afterwards “I shouldn’t have done that!”, or when you’re making a critical shot, you do the thing you’re trying to avoid. Calm Golf helps you stay mindful and play better golf.

Golf is a game of constant problem-solving, with players assessing wind, terrain, hazards, distances etc. for each shot, blending physical skill with focus, and emotional management. It is as much a mental workout as a physical one. Being mindful and giving rational consideration of your situation before a shot, clearing your mind and then focusing on the target, helps your athletic brain have effective control of your muscles during a shot. 

Too many thoughts, or allowing reactive thinking, will interfere with the process. For most of us, the golf swing happens too fast for cluttered thinking. The human brain has developed way to deal with threats and other needs, and consequently has parts that have learned to react quickly to certain situations. Anger events, such as throwing a club, happen before the rational parts of your mind consider its available options for dealing with an issue. Learning quick interception of these events and invoking rationality, is key to gaining self control.

Being ‘angry’ is learned, it isn’t simply because ‘that is the way you are’! It is learned, and each time you do it, reinforces it. The brain’s processes simply create chemicals that make you want to do it again. However, you can unlearn it. Being aware of your feelings, and moving reaction to rational, helps you control the frustration and play better golf.

In addition, being more aware of the four inches between your ears, helps in other ways. As an example, studies have shown that you shouldn’t have more than one thought during your swing and it needs to be simple and an action. Thinking “I must hit this better” doesn’t help! It needs to be a positive action thought like “one piece takeaway“, or ”keep the club face closed“. Too much thinking, frustration or anger, will negatively interfere with your brain’s athletic control of your muscles. 

The basic intent of Calm Golf is to keep you mindful and help you play better and more enjoyable golf. 

The Calm Golf Concept

To create mindfulness, Calm Golf helps you record your feelings about the quality of your game. After you make each shot, press the top right plus button in toolbar to add a shot, then select the conditions and feeling associated with the shot. From the menu you can choose which columns to record, and perhaps ignore club selection for shots, but from my experience, recording the shot quality, and associated feelings, helps keep better control of your game. 

There is no simple panacea to immediately switch off anger, and frustration, when you are playing badly. However, being mindful helps you be aware of encroaching anger, and though awareness, and using the techniques suggested later, helps you keep control of that anger as it develops. 

Your brain is like a complex computer with many different parts thinking and making decisions in parallel. Through evolution, some parts of our brain are reactive and some are rational. Be rational.

Don’t Focus on Your Score

The main focus here is to make you aware of your mental state before things happen. During a game, it is best not to focus on your score but focus on self control. If you can stay mindful, then in time you will score better, and more importantly, you will have more fun playing the game!

However, if you are feeling better about yourself, Calm Golf also lets you score and customize how you record your shots. 

Name it, Breathe it, Move it!

NBM is a process that I have found critical to controlling anger. If you have anger or rage issues on the golf course, I suggest you learn this one concept. 

I came across this in a Michael Hunter video on TikTok, which is worth finding and watching, but he has a website at https://www.upspiral.life. He essentially says “Chronic anger floods your system with cortisol, shrinks your hippocampus and messes with your memory, which then tanks your impulse control. Anger is not natural, it’s a rehearsal, and each time reinforcing the anger mechanism”. In the field of psychology, you can find other references to similar ideas but I think this one relates best to anger in golf.

"Neurons that fire together wire together! Hebb’s law”.  You’re practicing rage. “It gives you a hit of certainty in a world that seems unpredictable”, which almost seems like part of the definition of golf! "It costs you focus, sleep and long term brain health. Stop anger with biology”. “Name it, Breathe it and Move it!”.

1/ Name It

Anger is a natural emotion that activates the primitive reactive alarm system, your amygdala, in your brain. It tells you when something feels unfair, unsafe, or out of control. But when it lingers, it keeps your brain’s alarm system, the amygdala, on high alert. Naming, or labeling it, moves the feeling from your amygdala to your pre frontal cortex, where you think and reason before reacting. This can calm the amygdala, and your anger impulse. If you let your amygdala control your response, it will result in rage with maybe a thrown club, and loss of respect from your friends! Consciously naming it, saying “I’m Angry” in your mind helps you become rational and reflective again, and rational thinking is the first element in controlling a bad situation.

2/ Breathe It

Learn controlled Breathing. For example, inhale slowly for 4 seconds, exhale slowly for 6 seconds and repeat 4 times. Long, controlled exhalations stimulate the vagus nerve, activating your parasympathetic system — your body’s built-in calm mode. You’re not simply suppressing anger — you’re resetting your physiology.

The military teach a similar concept called Box Breathing to help create calm under stress; breathe in for 4 seconds, hold it for 4 seconds, breathe out slowly for 4 seconds and then hold it again for 4 seconds, then repeat the process 4 times.

Simply learn a controlled breathing technique that works for you, and use any time you start to feel frustration, but especially when you sense anger, do it as part of your NBM.

3/ Move It

Anger is adrenaline that needs somewhere to go and you need to burn it off. Physical movement helps dissipate it. 

Walk briskly, stretch, wave your arms, simply move. Physical movement burns cortisol and re-wires your stress response. In my experience, after a few bad shots and you start to feel frustration and anger, get out of the cart and walk quickly to the next shot, and loosen your shoulders, wave your arms … do whatever it takes to burn off the bad chemicals, before they induce rage. As I am sure most of you know, adrenaline is bad for golf! Motion rewires your stress response, teaching your body that it’s safe to stand down.

Other Processes for Anger Management

Note that there are other similar references with a technique called “Name it to Tame it!” by Dr Dan Siegal clinical professor of psychology at UCLA. “Name it to Tame it!” involves identifying and quickly naming your emotions to help regulate them, activating the prefrontal cortex, which can calm the more reactive parts of the brain. This allows for a more thoughtful response instead of an impulsive one. 

The key to all of this is mindfulness and being aware of your developing emotions. Calm Golf lets you record your shots with your emotions and helps you develop a sense of when things start to go wrong and how to deal with them.

Early Warning Signs

Learn your early warning signs that anger is building, as you go from calm to frustrated, to anger to rage and fury. When the early warning signs appear, name it, start to rationalize it, use controlled breathing to reset your body and then move around to redistribute any anger chemicals in the body. 

The signs … tensing up, gripping the club tightly, hitting thin shots, looking away from the ball in air, clenching your teeth, heavy breathing, snorting, staring, feeling the urge to speak loud, making comments critical of your shot, tapping your foot, or the club, feeling on edge, feeling shaky, becoming argumentative … are all leading to anger and rage. Sense them and control them quickly before they grow.

Frustration

Sensing frustration is often the easiest way to predict impending doom! You have a couple of bad shots, mine often come in fours, you start feeling frustration build, which causes your muscles to tense, which in turn makes you hit bad shots. All of a sudden you have all sorts of swing thoughts in your head suggesting instant fixes. You stand over the ball ready to kill it, your athletic brain is ready to help you, but all of your other thoughts get in the way and prevent its communication to your muscles. Another bad shot!

Too much random thinking during a swing limits the ability of the brain to communicate to your muscles!

Acceptance

It seems obvious but you need to remind yourself regularly that you will make errors and you will have bad games. Accepting that golf isn’t a game of perfect will help manage your own day to day limitations. It is a simple fact that you will play better if you can manage your expectations from shot to shot, and keep your emotions under control. If you can put aside your emotions from the previous shot, you will have a better chance with the next one.

Use your rational thinking to make confident shots you can control, while keeping in mind your ability limitations for the day.

Develop a consistent pre-shot routine. Stand about six feet behind your ball, figure the distance, pick a club, think about the shot, make a practice swing and stop thinking. Get into your stance, check your alignment, focus on your target and swing the club. Remember that you can only have one action thought to help your swing but otherwise don’t think over the ball and let your at athletic brain do its job.

Using the App

The start menu has options to let you start a new round, review previous rounds and access this help page.

Start New Round

After you select “Start New Round”, the app will show a view with a selection of available nearby courses. The app uses any courses that have been setup in “Open Street Map”, or OSM, which is a map database maintained by volunteers who take the time to map local features. It has many of the golf courses in the world, usually with enough detail to help provide GPS based hole distances. If you tap the course name, the map will zoom in on the course and show the available holes. If it shows hole numbers then it should be able to provide distances from your location to the greens.

I should add that the primary purpose of this app is not to provide shot distances but to help you be mindful and aware of developing emotions and you may prefer to select the option to use without distances.

Tap the Select button in the top right corner to confirm your option.

Recording Shots

In the main view, your shots per hole are recorded in the hole table at the top, with the round total is given in the middle of the top navigation bar.

To enter shots, tap the plus button in the top right corner. This will add a row in the table below the hole scores. Tapping any of the entries in the columns will bring up a popup menu with a list of options that you can record, including the club, shot type, ball lie, quality and your feeling about the shot. Add each of your shots and most importantly, record the quality and your feelings.

From your recorded quality and feelings, the app will continuously monitor your emotional progress and provide feedback to help warn you of possible issues. Just recording the quality and your feelings after each shot is usually enough to make you mindful, and this helps control your calmness.

Menu 

In the top left, the menu under the three dots provides various options. 

Finish

Selecting finish will take you back to the start view. This also closes the current round and saves it for future reference.

If you re-open the round from the start page, then you can also open the round for editing if you need to make changes, but you should select finish when done to lock, close and save the round.

Select Columns

Tapping select columns will bring up a view that allows you to select columns. Disabling any column will remove it from the view. To make emotional scoring simpler, you could switch off the club, shot and lie columns. If you get confident in your emotional control then you can switch off quality and feelings! 

Edit club or Shot Types

Tapping “Club Types” or “Shot Types” allows you to add, remove and re-order club and shot types. Club types should be kept to three of less characters to fit in the table width.

Notes

Selecting “Notes” will bring up a view that lets you record your own swing thoughts. This provides a handy list of ongoing swing thoughts after being on the driving range or when you find solutions to ongoing issues.

From the toolbar you can order your swing thoughts in your preferred manual order or by date recency. In the notes table, your notes can be moved and deleted using the toolbar buttons, or by swiping the rows.

Options

The “Options” view lets you select quick scoring, imperial or metric units (yards or meters for distances), and the preferred map type, standard or satellite.

Feedback and Questions

If you have any feedback, questions or suggestions, please send an email to “eagolfe@gmail.com”.